My friend Lotte Passer, who has died aged 99, was instrumental in rescuing some 60 German Jews – family, friends, children and strangers – during the second world war. Yet Lotte was modest about her remarkable achievement, putting it down to luck, timing and the help of others. "I was born under a lucky star," she would say.

Born Lotte Brock, she was educated in Berlin and went to the Sorbonne in Paris to study French. In 1934 she returned to Berlin and, having failed to persuade her widowed mother to leave, headed for London to live on her own. She found work as a home help for the family of the physicist Herbert Dingle. Coming from a wealthy, middle-class Jewish family, she knew little about domestic chores. But the Dingles became her family and remained so for the rest of her life.

When Kristallnacht erupted in November 1938 and Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were attacked or destroyed, Lotte contacted her mother. "Start packing," she said. At the time Lotte was dating a young man who hoped to marry her, but she turned him down. This was no time for a wedding; there was too much to be done.

Lotte looked for premises where she might house her mother, family and other Jews she hoped to get out of Germany. Her home in Swain's Lane, Highgate, soon became a kind of dormitory for refugees. Lotte worked tirelessly, helped by the Dingles and their friends, dealing with bureaucracy and documentation, and finding guarantors and homes for children.

After the war, Lotte became a PA to the managing director of an import/export business and, in 1959, married Kurt Passer, a lawyer from Prague.

When he died in 1985, her nephew, Tom, and his devoted wife, Ute, looked after her needs but she remained fiercely independent to the end. A well-loved local figure in Highgate, she was instantly recognisable with her shock of white hair and stylish clothes.